Music Issue

For those about to rock, we salute you

Welcome to the annual Boise Weekly music issue. As with all of our special issues, we humbly offer up a few servings of tasty tidbits that we hope will help broaden your tastes--in this case, your musical ones.

To start, our intrepid editor-in-chief, Nicholas Collias, refused to settle for just another run-of-the-mill story. He set out on a quest to find the oldest recorded music in Idaho. As he searched and researched, he found a plethora of fascinating historical recordings and the amazing people behind them. He also discovered a couple of people who are about to set out on a monumental project: recreating a 150-year-old band from a stack of hand-written scores--which you can now listen to, for free, in the Music Issue Jukebox at www.boiseweekly.com

From the distant past, we'll jump to the near future with an introduction to the Boise Weekly Local Music Festival 2006, held May 4 through 6. This is the first year we decided to have a live music showcase. In order to make sure we did everything right, though, we knew we had to keep this first festival small and manageable. With so much good local music to choose from, narrowing down the contenders was no easy task. We didn't have time for musicians to submit samples and then bring in a judge and jury to decide who would play. We did however, have one source from which to quickly and easily get a list of great performers: me. In my time as music editor, I have heard (if not interviewed and profiled) every musician in the festival lineup, and I'm honored to have each one of them be a part of this event.

The final element in this special issue is a list of bars, clubs and venues that feature live music and a long list of musicians. If you are a bar, club or venue owner, or a band and you do not see your name on these printed pages, not to worry. Go to www.boiseweekly.com, click on "submit an event" on the left side, and send us all your info. We'll add it to our comprehensive online list so the whole world will be able to read about you.

Thanks for all of your support and we hope to see you rocking in the free world (or in downtown Boise, at least).